Erich Fromm citations
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Erich Fromm, né à Francfort le 23 mars 1900 et mort à Locarno le 18 mars 1980, est un sociologue et psychanalyste américain d'origine allemande.

Il est avec Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse et d'autres, un des premiers représentants de l'École de Francfort. Il a greffé, d'une façon critique et originale qui lui est propre, la thèse freudienne sur la réalité sociale qui s'est fait jour dans l'après-guerre.

Par ailleurs, Erich Fromm fut l'un des premiers penseurs du XXe siècle à parler de l'idée d'un revenu de base inconditionnel. Wikipedia

✵ 23. mars 1900 – 18. mars 1980

Erich Fromm photo

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Erich Fromm: 120 citations0 J'aime

Erich Fromm Citations

“La raison découle du mélange de la pensée rationnelle et des sentiments. Si les deux fonctions se dissocient, la pensée se détériore en activité intellectuelle schizoïde et les sentiments en passions névrotiques autodestructrices.”

Erich Fromm: Citations en anglais

“Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.”

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Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 109

“Chronic boredom — compensated or uncompensated — constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.”

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Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 273

“To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.”

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The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (1968)

“In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child’s separation.”

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Erich Fromm livre The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2

“By necrophilia is meant love for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of "order." The necrophile, lacking the necessary qualities to create, in his impotence finds it easy to destroy because for him it serves only one quality: force.”

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Credo (1965)

“The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that which they both have in common: fusion without integrity.”

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Erich Fromm livre The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2

“I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between "life" and "death"; between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.”

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Credo (1965)

“By narcissism is meant ceasing to have an authentic interest in the outside world but instead an intense attachment to oneself, to one’s own group, clan, religion, nation, race, etc. — with consequent serious distortions of rational judgment. In general, the need for narcissistic satisfaction derives from the necessity to compensate for material and cultural poverty.”

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Credo (1965)

“By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents — blood, family, tribe — to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.”

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Credo (1965)

“I believe that the nature of man is a contradiction rooted in the conditions of human existence that requires a search for solutions, which in their turn create new contradictions and now the need for answers.
I believe that every answer to these contradictions can really satisfy the condition of helping man to overcome the sense of separation and to achieve a sense of agreement, of unity, and of belonging.
I believe that in every answer to these contradictions, man has the possibility of choosing only between going forward or going back; these choices, which are translated into specific actions, are means toward the regressing or toward the progressing of the humanity that is in us.”

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Credo (1965)

“People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.”

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Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 30

“Man’s biological weakness is the condition of human culture.”

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Erich Fromm livre Escape from Freedom

Source: Escape from Freedom (1941), Ch. 2

“Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.”

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Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 4

“Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings.”

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Erich Fromm livre The Art of Loving

The Art of Loving (1956)

“Among most Christians the Old Testament is little read in comparison to the New Testament. Furthermore, much of what is read is often distorted by prejudice. Frequently the Old Testament is believed to express exclusively the principles of justice and revenge, in contrast to the New Testament, which represents those of love and mercy; even the sentence, "Love your neighbor as yourself,” is thought by many to derive from the New, not the Old Testament. Or the Old Testament is believed to have been written exclusively in the spirit of narrow nationalism and to contain nothing of supranational universalism so characteristic of the New Testament.”

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You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition (1966) "Introduction"

“What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.”

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Erich Fromm livre The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 1

“Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.”

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Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 4

“I believe in the possible realization of a world in which man can be much, even if he has little; a world in which the dominant motivation of existence is not consumption; a world in which "man" is the end, first and last; a world in which man can find the way of giving a purpose to his life as well as the strength to live free and without illusions.”

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Credo (1965)

“The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.”

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Erich Fromm livre Escape from Freedom

Source: Escape from Freedom (1941), Ch. 7

“The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.”

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Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 262

“If the individual realizes his self by spontaneous activity and thus relates himself to the world, he ceases to be an isolated atom; he and the world become part of one structuralized whole; he has his rightful place, and thereby his doubt concerning himself and the meaning of life disappears. This doubt sprang from his separateness and from the thwarting of life; when he can live, neither compulsively nor automatically but spontaneously, the doubt disappears. He is aware of himself as an active and creative individual and recognizes that there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.”

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Erich Fromm livre Escape from Freedom

Source: Escape from Freedom (1941), Ch. 7, p. 262-3

“The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx’s concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud’s.”

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"The Art of Being" Pt. 3 (1989)

“The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a "loving” mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.”

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Erich Fromm livre The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2

“I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.”

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Credo (1965)

“Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution.”

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Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 264

“I believe that freedom is not a constant attribute that "we have" or "we don’t have"; perhaps there is only one reality: the act of liberating ourselves in the process of using choices. Every step in life that heightens the maturity of man heightens his ability to choose the freeing alternative.
I believe that "freedom of choice" is not always equal for all men at every moment. The man with an exclusively necrophilic orientation; who is narcissistic; or who is symbiotic-incestuous, can only make a regressive choice. The free man, freed from irrational ties, can no longer make a regressive choice.”

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Credo (1965)

“I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought.”

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Credo (1965)

“Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibilty would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person's individuality.”

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Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 3; in Ch. 2 of his later work The Art of Loving (1956) a similar statement is made :
Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.

“Happiness is the indication that man has found the answer to the problem of human existence: the productive realization of his potentialities and thus, simultaneously, being one with the world and preserving the integrity of his self. In spending his energy productively he increases his powers, he "burns without being consumed.“”

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Source: Man for Himself (1947), p.189

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